Welcome to the Twin Zone

Thurman and Sidney Sewell, better known as the ATL Twins, cozy up around a woman's butt in the bed of their penthouse apartment in Midtown Atlanta. Photos by Paul Birman, Chris Nieratko, and Troy Stains.

D o you think we could fuck Selena Gomez?” asked the voice on the other end of my iPhone, a little over a year ago. His deep Tennessean twang added extra emphasis to the word fuck.

“Yes, of course. Definitely,” I replied. “Who is Selena Gomez?”

“She’s that Disney bitch.”

In the year since this conversation, I’ve realized that most people find it hard to believe that I had never heard of one of the most famous young celebrities in the world until Sidney and Thurman Sewell—better known as the ATL Twins—mentioned her to me that day on the phone. But I’ve been a bit out of the loop on all things Disney since I stopped writing for their children’s digest, Disney Adventures, back in 1995. The only Disney bitch I know is Minnie Mouse. And even though I was unaware of Selena and her hit Disney teenybopper television show Wizards of Waverly Place before our call, I’m still confident that one day Thurm and Sid will double-penetrate her young orifices to oblivion. That’s what the ATL Twins do. So it was strange that they seemed so hesitant.

“But she’s dating Justin Bieber,” Thurm continued.

“Do you think Justin Bieber has a nine-inch cock?” I asked. “And even if he does, he definitely doesn’t have two of them.”

“Nah, I doubt it,” Thurm said and began laughing hysterically.

And that, my friends, is what you get when you fuck with the ATL Twins: 18 inches of raging-hard dick coming at you from either side. They are a package deal. The Twins had called to tell me that they had just been cast in Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s beautiful new film about four bikini-clad, seemingly goody-goody gals on spring break in St. Petersburg, Florida. The girls—Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, and former Disney stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens—get in way over their heads when they are arrested at an out-of-control hotel party, and a gun-toting drug dealer named Alien, played by a scumbagified James Franco, bails them out of jail alongside the Twins, who are employed as Alien’s silent henchmen. Despite not uttering a single word in the film, the Twins’ presence is as memorable as any of the headliners, and their unsettling silence only adds to their mystique. Their roles will only intensify the public’s curiosity about the real story behind the brothers, resulting in more pussy than they will possibly be able to handle (their volume is already at critical mass).

The entire cast loved the Twins. Weeks before the film’s release Selena Gomez was on French radio saying that she and the girls passed time by laughing at their antics. And James Franco was so affected by working with them that their time together inspired a poem, published for the first time here:

Double

Something scary: There is a pair of twins
From Atlanta.
They’re identical.

They’ve got hip-hop style
And chase ambulances
For a living.
But they want to be famous.

They’re the same person
In two bodies.
They are never apart.
They sleep in the same bed,

Finish each other’s sentences,
And share their women.
They like double penetration,
It’s all they talk about.

At one point they were engaged
To a Penthouse model;
Only one would have been legal,
But they both would have kissed

Her at the wedding ceremony.

Ever since they were put on this earth, the longest period of time the ATL Twins have spent apart has been six hours when Sidney was locked up for a DUI. Otherwise they are always together, with the exception of a few minutes here and there to shit, shave, and shower. Every possession, emotion, and experience is shared: They have one car, one bed, and sleep with the same women. At 13 they simultaneously lost their virginity to a 21-year-old stripper, and they were once both engaged to a Penthouse Pet who, according to the Twins, broke their hearts after her parents pressured her to leave them. Someday they want to father children from one woman, which isn’t so surprising when you consider that they believe themselves to be a single person with two bodies. They are mirror-image twins, meaning that the egg that spawned them split in two somewhere around ten days after fertilization, which is very late in the game (any longer and the chances of birthing conjoined twins increases dramatically). They are genetically and physically identical, but their features are reversed. Sid is right-handed, while Thurm’s a lefty. If they stand face-to-face, you notice that what seem like slight differences in their appearance actually mirror one another exactly. Unlike the bearded, fictitious dildo in those Dos Equis commercials, Sid and Thurm are truly the most unique and interesting men I know.

As I’ve said since I first met them a year and a half ago, the ATL Twins are a psychologist’s wet dream, and as with most psychoses, their version of reality was formed at an early age. Growing up dirt poor in Chattanooga, they were forced to make friends with a wide variety of cockroaches, subsist off food stamps, and basically raise themselves. But even though their early life presented many challenges, they were still part of a loving family who tried their best to make ends meet even when their luck hit rock bottom.

“You got to understand how we grew up. My family all slept in one bed, five of us,” they said (because the Twins frequently finish each other’s sentences and sometimes speak in tandem, moving forward, all quotes will be attributed to both). “It wasn’t by choice, and it was normal. We lived in hood houses. Where we grew up in Chattanooga was gnarly. There were a bunch of killers and stone-cold motherfuckers around us. The movie Gummo gives you a pretty good idea of what it was like. People would try to kidnap you; you’d be outside and creepos would come up and ask if you needed a ride. It was scary. There were prostitutes and drug dealers. The old white people who were still there in the house behind us got broken into and murdered—they beat the dude and his wife to death.”

Family photos of the Twins with their two sisters, mother, and father. When they were 12, their dad injured himself lifting weights. This incident led to a downward spiral of health problems, including diabetes and dependence on a pacemaker. At one point, he was taking dozens of medications a day.

Given their environment, Sid and Thurm were forced to grow up fast and take care of each other. When they were 12 their father injured himself lifting weights and had to have shoulder surgery. It was the first in a long line of health problems, and within a few years, he had come down with diabetes, had a pacemaker installed, and was taking dozens of medications a day. Things got so bad that their mom moved out; the Twins told me that she just couldn’t handle the pressure. This left them to take care of their dad the best they could without much outside help.

“When we were 14 we watched our dad die in our arms,” the Twins grimly told me as they recalled their father’s passing. “It was a Friday night and we were out skating and we were going to go party all night, but we got a weird feeling that we should go home. We went home and hung out with our dad all night. We watched the movie Tombstone, which I’ve never watched since and never will watch it again. We had a good time, we were talking about pussy and he was feeling good. The next morning he woke us up and said he wasn’t feeling good. He was dizzy, saying he felt like he was about to black out. We called 911 and they told us to try mouth-to-mouth while the ambulance was on its way, but that didn’t work. They showed up and were trying the electric-shock pads and that wasn’t working. We were hysterical. They didn’t say he was dead, but deep down we knew. They took him away, and an hour later our aunts called and said he’d passed. We were really close to our dad. He was always honest with us and told us how shit really was.”

While their father’s death was one of the most traumatic memories of their lives, their inability to separate for more than a few moments was made apparent long before. Their mother, Patricia, explains: “They were enrolled in day care when they were about two years old. On one particular day one of them was sick and the other was not. When I took the well one to school, they held each other so tight I couldn’t pull them apart. They were screaming and crying, and it was painful and heart-wrenching to watch. Needless to say, they both stayed home that day.”

Despite an early start in schooling, the Twins didn’t make it past eighth grade. Their only ambition in life was skateboarding. After their father died they had nowhere to live, so they moved into their 17-year-old sister’s basement apartment, where they slept on the floor. They skated all day, every day, and partied all night.

LEFT: Sid shows off his snakehead necklace. RIGHT: Thurm smiles as he is groped by one of his many lady friends.

“It was amazing,” they said. “But one day this truancy officer shows up at 3:30 in the afternoon. We had just woken up because we’d sleep all day, and we got shook. We were fucking this older chick who would come to Atlanta to strip, and we called her up and asked her to give us a ride to Atlanta because our mom had just moved there. That’s how we came to be living in Atlanta.”

When the Twins first arrived at their mother’s house they walked into what looked like a crack den, which wasn’t so far from the truth. The garage door was rammed in, and inside someone had punched holes all over the walls and smashed the TV. It didn’t take them long to realize that their mom’s live-in boyfriend, Kelvin, was responsible for the destruction. The Twins described him as a “piece-of-shit crackhead”—one of those guys who attempts to offset his balding head by letting his remaining hair grow long and keeping a thick moustache. It quickly became apparent that the domestic situation had spiraled out of control.

“We’re in our room with this huge sack, smoking weed with this older stripper walking around half naked,” the Twins said. “It was probably about one in the morning when we hear this loud-ass knock at the door. It’s a 5-0. We’re high as fuck and thinking they’re after us because of that truancy-officer shit. Then this dude Kelvin runs in wearing Speedos and hands the stripper a bag of crack and says, ‘Here! Stuff this in your panties, honey!’ and then tells us, ‘You ain’t seen me!’ He runs out and a few minutes later the door is kicked open and all these cops come in and ask, ‘Where’s Kelvin?’ They start searching around the room; it smells of weed, we got this older chick in there, they’re like, ‘What the fuck is going on in here?’ Out in the hallway my mom is crying and sort of nodding up toward the drop-down door to the attic. They go up and get him, and he’s wrapped up in insulation, and he’s all, ‘Baby! Don’t do this!’ That’s when our mom tells us, ‘Yeah, he held me hostage for the past two days, stole my car, forced me to go buy crack, he beat the house up, and I was able to call the cops when he wasn’t looking.’ That was our first day in Atlanta.”

Even though the Twins’ relationship with their mother is sometimes tense, she is nothing but happy for their success, even if she doesn’t completely support their lifestyle. “Despite incredible odds,” she said, “Sidney and Thurman have attained some impressive achievements. I am proud of them. They have a burning desire to become rich and famous, and I know they will reach their goal because they have the charisma, energy, and determination to accomplish whatever they set their mind to. Although I am proud of their success, I am not proud of their reckless lifestyle. I wish they would drink less and sleep more.”